Journal of Environmental Media - Volume 2, Issue s1, 2021

This article examines the environmental impacts of the US military presence in Hawaiʻi, looking specifically at the federal government’s power to condemn land for a ‘public purpose’ under the US Constitution. In 2018, the Hawaiʻi Supreme Court ruled that the State of Hawaiʻi failed its duty to properly manage 23,000 acres of lands leased to the military at Pōhakuloa and must take an active role in preserving trust property. With the expiration of this lease (and several others) approaching in 2029, controversy is stirring as to whether the military will simply condemn these lands if the cost of clean-up is greater than the land’s fair-market value at the expiration of the lease. In other words, as long as it remains cheaper for the military to pollute and condemn than it is for it to restore, what options do we have for legal and political recourse? Considering grassroots movements’ strategic use of media and legal action through an environmental justice lens, this article provides a starting point to consider avenues for ensuring proper clean-up of these lands, and ultimately, negotiating for their return to Kānaka Maoli.

Relying heavily on newspaper archives, this article explores the ‘first rough draft’ of Honolulu’s early urban frontier to rescue the spectacle of environmental and emergency management in the early twentieth-century town of Kakaʻako. Analysing the interdependent discursive and material processes in response to public health crisis – viewed here serving as a continuation of colonialism – I show how Kakaʻako existed as a release valve for detritus as part of a dialectical process towards development. Spaces like Kakaʻako proved central to the partitioning of urban space, serving as receptacles of bio-sociocultural waste. This article details how cycles of emergency cordoned-off spaces utilized to contain, discipline or assimilate certain groups, provoking the development and evacuation of that which is judged as unfit and unworthy while engendering the notion of profitability as a necessary precondition to inhabiting city space.

Between 2017 and 2019, the Manaro volcano on the island of Ambae in Vanuatu erupted consistently, leading to two compulsory evacuations of the island’s communities. The eruption was only one of many ecological emergencies unfolding in Vanuatu as climate change continues to affect the islands. Amidst these overlapping crises, community leaders and the national government leveraged customary tenure practices to develop a system of customary reunion and secondary homes for evacuees. An analysis of 54 articles from the Vanuatu Daily Post’s media coverage of the Manaro eruption and disaster recovery from 2017 to 2019 reveals the centrality of customary tenure. While political ecologists have illustrated how disaster recovery policies can become disastrous in and of themselves, this article elaborates upon alter-native disaster recovery practices in Vanuatu and affirms the centrality of land control to Indigenous and settler futures.

This article considers how Indigenous stories and chants can tell us about our ecologies in the time of environmental emergencies. For Ngāti Porou of the lower reaches of the Waiapu river catchment in Te Ika-a-Māui, the North Island of Aotearoa (New Zealand), the slow catastrophes of twentieth-century colonial deforestation impacts, introduced pest-induced inland forest collapse and predicted twenty-first-century climate change sea level rise have converged as our most pressing environmental problems. Waiapu is home to Ngāti Porou Tūturu, coastal fishing people who value their relationships with fish species, notably kahawai. The mōteatea chant form acts as a guide to my photographic and moving image practice to visualize and voice the slow catastrophe of the river. In this article, I discuss how the Ngāti Porou mōteatea He Tangi mo Pāhoe, which reveals nineteenth-century ecological knowledge, particularly of fish species, is reimagined as a moving image visual mōteatea. Through reframing the threats as the current faces of our ancestors, this article proposes a shift in thinking from vulnerability into resilience.

This article builds an ecofeminist lens from community efforts as a form of feeling alternative futures in Hawaiʻi, with broader application for elsewhere. Women and children are critical groups on the front lines of climate-related crises, including food and housing insecurity, and the fight for environmental justice. Drawing upon personal experience, in this article, I highlight several grassroots projects that I have been connected to on the island of Oʻahu in Hawaiʻi that exemplify community-based efforts to conceptualize, build and feel sustainable alternative futures. In the face of compounding human existential crises, it is women’s grassroots community organizing, Indigenous knowledges and traditional Hawaiian practices that are leading the way to sustainable food production, community building, and resurgent Hawaiian sovereignty. Through practical community-engaged experience, and learning from these communities, we can feel ecofeminist alternative futures and enact sustainable practices that challenge the current climate emergency.

In this article, addressing the absences of cultural memory from existing institutional archives is accounted for in the development of new curatorial display territories, both online and in the gallery. The imperatives to claim new digital territories as extensions of homeland territories are contextualized within the discussion of the curated works in the first in a series of exhibitions titled Sāmoan Hxstories, Screens and Intimacies supported from Tkaronto/Toronto by imagineNATIVE Film and Media Arts Festival for the Indigenous world and for all Sāmoan diasporas. The co-design of new Indigenous language terms including siapo viliata are also discussed.

In the summer of 2020, tensions rose at sx̌ʷəx̌ʷnitkʷ, an ancestral fishing village site, for the Syilx Okanagan Peoples due to a landowner seeking to exclude access to a portion of q̓awsitkʷ (Okanagan) river. Access to sx̌ʷəx̌ʷnitkʷ is integral for Syilx Nation building and realizing embodied relationships with the Salmon peoples, which have been hindered by a multiplicity of factors that almost removed salmon completely from the Territory. Sensory access throughout the village site is not only important to rebuild relations with the salmon, but also those with the place itself. sx̌ʷəx̌ʷnitkʷ remains a portal of relationality with waterscapes from the high mountains into the Pacific Ocean. Waterscapes connect peoples, polities and humans/more-than-humans throughout their spaces of motion. In an era of altered river pathways, intensified relationships grounded in particular waterscapes can help to build relations beyond the structural blockages that fragment the flow of the river and its ecologies. These relationships are important for collaborative healing throughout the watershed. Renewing relations with ecologies of flow and motion bring to question the fragmented jurisdictions that seek to carve up Indigenous territories.

How do you teach about crises amid crisis? This article and accompanying zine reflect on my preparation for and delivery of an undergraduate seminar about the intersecting environmental, social and political crises that are frequently bundled together under the term ‘the Anthropocene’. Our course was designed and taught amid the COVID-19 global pandemic. Through readings, guest lectures and a digital humanities writing project, my students and I worked to take a desire-based rather than damage-centred approach to receiving and telling stories about the lost futures we are living through and the lost futures to come.